FAISAL'S COMPLEX COURSE

The King's palace in Riyadh, which I visited in November 1973, was on a monumental scale. Preceded by two sword carriers, I was taken to a tremendous hall. Dozens of men (women being strictly segregated) in identical black robes and white headdresses were seated along the walls, immobile and silent. What seemed like 100 yards away on a slightly raised pedestal sat King Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud, aquiline of feature, regal of bearing. He rose as I entered, forcing all the princes and sheiks to follow suit in a flowing balletlike movement of black and white. He took one step toward me; I had to traverse the rest of the way. I learned later that his taking a step forward was a sign of great courtesy. I reflected on what strange twists of fate had caused a refugee from Nazi persecution to wind up in Arabia as the representative of American democracy.

During dinner, when the King spoke, all was silent; my comments were drowned in a buzz of conversation. The silences for the King heightened my awareness of Faisal's standard speech. Its basic proposition was that Jews and Communists were working now in parallel, now together, to undermine the civilized world as we knew it.

Oblivious to my ancestry--or delicately putting me into a special category--Faisal insisted that an end had to be put once and for all to the dual conspiracy of Jews and Communists. The Middle East outpost of that plot was Israel, put there by Bolshevism for the principal purpose of dividing America from the Arabs.

It was hard to know where to begin in answering.

When Faisal went on to argue that the Jewish-Communist conspiracy was now trying to take over the American Government, I decided to try to change the subject. I did not help matters by referring to Sadat as the leader of the Arabs. His Majesty's morose reaction showed that there was a limit beyond which claims to Arab solidarity could not be pushed.

In Faisal the imperatives of conviction and tactical expediency merged; he both believed in what he was doing and did what served his purposes. The speech on Communism and Zionism, however bizarre it sounded to Westerners, was deeply felt. At the same time it reflected precisely the tactical necessities of the kingdom. The strident anti-Communism helped reassure America and established a claim to protection against outside threats (which were all, in fact, backed by the Soviet Union). The virulent anti-Zionism reassured radicals and the P.L.O. and reduced their incentive to undermine the monarchy.

Faisal was as honorable as he was subtle. He was a man of his word; indeed, he generally delivered more than he promised. If one understood Saudi policy as the result of all the forces at work in the area rather than as the shaper of them, that perception was right. If the statesman acts as the helmsman in storm-tossed seas, Faisal performed masterfully in keeping his fragile bark always heading into the wind and having it emerge intact--no mean achievement, when one considers the fate of countries all around him.

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